


three two one BOOM

by feroxargentea



Category: due South
Genre: Case Fic, Extended Families, M/M, Semi-established relationship, gratuitous objectification of RayK, snark is love, the soup is probably symbolical or something
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-04 08:38:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5327726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's just a soup anecdote, Ray."</p>
            </blockquote>





	three two one BOOM

**Author's Note:**

  * For [happy29](https://archiveofourown.org/users/happy29/gifts).



> Written for due South Seekrit Santa 2015.
> 
> Thank you kindly to those who helped beta: cj2017, DesireeArmfeldt and alltoseek. Particularly alltoseek, who shouted at me in ALLCAPS till I added a postscript :)

* * *

**_“It’s just a soup anecdote, Ray.”_**  

* * *

 

“So cough up, Benny. Who rattled his cage?”

I’d waited till we were out on the sidewalk before I called him on it, which meant I had to pause while he helped an elderly nun cross the street, and then watch him chase three separate pieces of windblown trash (“because it’s our civic duty to dispose of them into the correct municipal waste receptacles, Ray”), all as if it had nothing to do with avoiding the goddamn question.

“Cage,” I said, grabbing him by both shoulders and pointing him in the direction of the pizzeria. “Dewey’s. Come on, Frase, how’d you rattle it this time?”

He had his “Well, Ray” expression going, the one that’s usually short for “Well, Ray, permit me to preface my explanation with a pointless anecdote regarding Inuit folk customs about which I am perfectly aware you do not give a rat’s ass”, but what he actually said was, “I’m afraid that relations between Detective Dewey and myself do seem to have deteriorated of late. Indeed, I suspect this very luncheon date with yourself and Detective Kowalski may have been a contributory factor. Either that, or perhaps the vending machine mix-up may have upset his natural humors.”

“The vending what?” I stumbled on a broken curbstone and righted myself on a passing cyclist. “What mix-up?”

“It would appear that the station’s chicken noodle soup option, number 17B if I’m not mistaken, was substituted with an alternative concoction. An emulsion of muskrat suet, to be precise, in an extract of mustard seed. But you needn’t be concerned, Ray. It’s entirely non-toxic, or so I’m told.”

The face of the Holy Innocents: he had it nailed. Wasn’t a court in the land could have made a charge stick. I knew it was an act, I _knew_ it was an act, but four years on, it was still unnerving how good he was at that shit.

“Substituted by who?” I said.

“By _whom_.”

“Fraser, just tell me who switched the damn soup! It was Kowalski, right? Kowalski did it, made you help?”

“Well, Ray, the only person with the requisite access to the appliance in question would be the vending machine operator, and she would hardly make a credible suspect, lacking as she does any plausible motive for _rattling_ ”—and here he halted just long enough to make careful air quotes—“for _rattling_ Detective Dewey’s _cage_.”

I gave up. No point asking who else had noticed that Dewey was the only guy in the precinct crazy enough to eat reconstituted vending-machine soup, or who else had memorized the junk-food stocker’s name along with all her grandkids’ birthdays. Six more months and I’d be done with this crap. I could have told Benny to keep his head down, say his Hail Marys (or whatever the hell the Inuktitut equivalent was), keep himself out of trouble, keep Kowalski out of trouble. Yeah, ’cause that’d work. And I could have asked one last time whether he was sure— _sure_ sure—that he wanted to take the KOTR gig. I saved my breath.

He was glancing over at me as he walked, all woeful-eyed, Little Boy Lost, save-me-now. And okay, I might have been immune to Constable “Fall at my feet, thank you kindly” Fraser, but I wasn’t entirely immune to the Eyes of Woe. Never had been. So I did the best I could for him, like I always had. I halted outside the pizza joint and glared at the door.

“You gonna get that or what?”

And he lit up and reached for the handle like I’d offered him the whole of Christmas tied up in one shiny reindeer-moss bow, like opening doors for me was just his favorite thing in the world ever. Which, him being a freak and all, it probably was.

“After you, Ray,” he said.

It’d been shaping up to be a shitty day to beat all previous shitty contenders, but Benny had a way of making days like that kinda…okay. Well, that and the fact that Kowalski was waiting in the restaurant, watching us. Getting that black of a scowl out of the twitchy bastard could have brightened a better man than me.

The thing with him? Yeah, see, turned out there were rules on magic bullets. Cough ’em up too soon, they count for squat. It figures – Occupational Health got targets to meet like the rest of us. But I’d rolled with it. Five more years to a full pension, not such a bum deal. And Detective “Don’t call me Stanley”, him we’d gotten all wrapped up ready to kick back to the Three-Six – and trust me, I had the paperwork signed, stamped and squared up before the deadline was a glint in Lieutenant Welsh’s bloodshot eye.

Five more years with Benny: that I could have dealt with, just about. Duck and weave, duck and weave, try not to croak.

Then some genius in the Upper Echelons, one of those crackerjacks too special to hump a real job, spots a dazzling red uniform in the squad room. Lightbulb moment: Constable Maple-Leaf might not be a fully paid-up member of the Chicago PD after all. Which leaves me one partner down. Hellooo, Stanley.

You ever get the feeling life’s kicking you in the nuts?

 

* * *

 

“Don’t gimme that crap, Dewey. The hell you think you were doing? You the kind of prick who used to shake the first graders down for their milk money? You don’t like your soup, you pick another goddamn soup. You do _not_ get to lay a hand on Fraser, you hear me?”

I’d gotten him shoved up against the restroom tiles, his spine bent round the towel dispenser, his feet scrabbling on the sticky linoleum. None of this was about the vending machine, we both knew that. Hell, the entire precinct probably knew that by now.

I twisted my head away, exhaling hard. The combination of Dewey’s aftershave and the Two-Seven’s hand soap was some heady kind of unconstitutional.

“Six months,” I said. “Six more months and I’m out of this madhouse for good. Got a transfer back to Vice all lined up, task force lead. Half a dozen spots to fill. You stay here, you’ll be stuck at Detective Second Grade till they bust you for imbecility unbecoming your office.”

The Bookman don’t gotta make promises, true, but Dewey was dumb enough he needed things laid out for him in giant flaming letters. He must have known I’d never wangle him a job, but I figured he’d be desperate enough to chase it anyway. I let go of him and watched him shrug back into his jacket and find some real interesting stains on the floor to stare at.

“You want out, you better start puckering up and kissing some major ass,” I said. “Which means mine, and it means Fraser’s, and it means anyone else’s I goddamn tell you. Even Kowalski’s. So make with the nice, capiche?”

 

* * *

 

**KOTR Truck I.D. KOTR-034, delivery #00168104, 50 kilometers outside of Regina, Saskatchewan**

Late afternoon: the sun’s angle of incidence as it reflected off the wet blacktop sent its rays slanting directly into the cab, painfully bright. Fraser tugged his cap down and pushed his dark glasses as high as they would go. As he did so an incongruous splash of red caught the corner of his eye, and there was his father, sitting bolt upright in the truck’s passenger seat, large as life and twice as scarlet, his uniform vivid against the sodden cornfields hurtling past the window.

“Hello, son.”

Fraser lunged for the satellite comms and flicked the switch. It was improbable that the equipment could pick up ghostly voices, but that wasn’t a risk he was willing to take, and while he was perfectly capable of curbing his own speech, as indeed he had always been, he had no such confidence in his father’s reticence.

“Er…hello, Dad?”

“Nice wheels you got here, Benton.” His father picked up the truck’s logbook and examined its insignia. “KOTR Haulage and Logistics. Dry goods distribution, eh? Interesting choice. You know, you might let _me_ drive once in a while.”

“I’ll certainly bear that in mind.” Because, sure, letting a dead man pilot an eighteen-wheeler down a storm-slickened highway at one hundred kilometers an hour was an option worthy of serious consideration. A few more hours of this, and he would be so tired he might just take it.

“There’s no call to be snippy.” His father propped his hat on the dash as if settling in for the long haul. “I don’t believe you’ll find the Highway Code specifically prohibits the use of vehicles by the deceased. Besides, you let that Yank of yours drive all the time.”

“Yes, in _his_ car.” Fraser didn’t bother to ask which Yank. His father had been referring to Ray Kowalski in this manner for some while now, and Fraser had been ignoring it for exactly the same while, a form of communication they could profitably maintain for a lifetime and then some.

“Are you here for a reason?” he said.

“Oh no, son, no. Just enjoying the open road. Stretching my legs, metaphorically speaking. I assume _you’re_ here for a reason, though?”

“Well, yes, obviously.” The highway, with its usual majestic disregard for contours, was heading ruler-straight for a cluster of low rolling hills, and Fraser busied himself with the necessary gear changes, but as the truck crested the rise he could still feel his father’s gaze on him. “Obviously,” he repeated, allowing a touch of irritation to seep into the word this time. “An assignment.”

“Ah.”

“An undercover assignment.”

“Ah. Well, I’ll be here, any time you feel like talking.” His father tapped on the logbook’s cover. “Any time.”

Fraser watched a road sign flash by: four hundred kilometers to Medicine Hat. It was going to be a long trip.

 

* * *

 

**Chicago**

Kowalski shoved his plate away, clattering the cutlery. “Fu—fiddlesticks, sorry, I gotta split. Gonna be late for ballet.”

“Ballet?” I echoed, perking up. One photo of him in a pink fluffy tutu and I’d be set with blackmail copy for life. A tutu, or maybe just those pantyhose things.

“Gotta go,” he said, edging his way round the table. “Thanks for the lasagna, Maria, you’re the best. See ya, Vecchio.”

Ma pinched his cheek as he pushed past her chair. “Such a good boy he is, that Kowalino,” she told me fondly. “Every week he picks little Gabriella up from her dance class, never fails.”

“He what?” I stared at her, two years behind on my own family history. That sneaky son of a bitch: at least he got _notes_ when he stole my life. I got bupkis back. “Ma, he doesn’t have to... You don’t need to... Damn it!”

I cut and ran for the hallway, with Frannie scrambling after me. I’d gotten one hand on the front door when she spun me round and faced me chin-on, like she might actually punch me, like she could take me, all five-foot-four of her and six months pregnant. And hey, I was so out of shape that maybe she could have. _I am the Bookman, hear me roar._ Funny thing: in Vegas you don’t do your own wetwork. Can’t risk blood-spatter on a thousand-dollar suit.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, untwist your panties, will ya?” she yelled. “What is _up_ with you?”

“What, apart from the fact that we just ate dinner for eight crammed into a room built for four, ’cause some asshole sold my damn house from under me?” I yelled back.

“Your house? Your _house?_ So it’s not the errands he runs for you that push your buttons, it’s the paperwork he filed? You wanted to come home from your Vegas swank to a burnt-out shell, that it?”

“Burnt out, my ass,” I snapped, but I’d dialed down on the yelling already. Funny how I was always the first to feel like an idiot. “I saw the photos of it, Frannie. It was mostly just water damage.”

“It was _condemned_ , Ray. Someone had to sign for it, and you weren’t there. You…weren’t…there. Okay, so this place is kinda shoddy, kinda cramped, maybe not top-knot enough for Mister Hotshot High-roller—”

“Notch, Frannie, top _notch_.”

“What-ever. Point is, you got twenty thousand bucks left over from the insurance payout, all stashed away in a high interest account he picked out just for you. So if you’re still mad at him, mister”—she poked me hard in the chest—“it ain’t about the darn house, now, is it?”

I slumped, and she must have seen some kind of defeat in my face because she pulled me into a hug, tight against her swollen belly, and held me close a while before she let me go. My little sister, not so dumb as she sometimes acted.

“Look, I know you and him aren’t...whatever,” she said, patting my lapels straight. “I know that. But you gotta cut him some slack, okay? He’s…” She paused, like she was reaching for the right word. “He’s family.”

Family. Who needs punches when you got a punchline like that?

 

* * *

 

“What the hell is your prob—?” Kowalski stopped dead, and then he kind of folded in on himself, all weird and hunched over in his standard-issue plastic chair. “Ah, forget it, Vecchio. Just forget it. Like I give a fuck, anyways.”

We’d been sitting there in the hospital morgue’s slime-colored corridor for half an hour, waiting on cause of death for a DOA. The vic was an overdose who’d been dead on scene, never mind on arrival, or so the EMTs had told us, but there’d been family watching them—family with a capital F, most likely—so they’d worked on her like they were going to find a miracle cure for deadness right there in the Pelusos’ living room. The medical examiner was still knee-deep in corpse sushi, and Kowalski was being a pussy about having to watch, so I’d called him on it, just to wind him up, and he’d gone from zero to blazing in three-point-oh like he always did, but then he’d cut off mid-word, looking suddenly real tired. Real old, too. I’d gotten so used to the stroppy teenager schtick by then that I kept forgetting he was graduating class of ’79, same as me. Not my little brother – my shadow self.

He’d pulled his glasses off and was rubbing at his eyes with the heel of one hand. “You don’t even get it, do you?” he said, so quietly I had to lean in a bit to catch the words. “Any of it. Fraser, I mean. You don’t even get that you were his goddamn...his goddamn cairn or whatever.”

“His...huh?”

“What, you need a friggin’ narrator? Look, they send me in, tell me to pretend I’m his best buddy. Hugs all round, good to see ya, Fraser old pal. And the guy ain’t even there. Not _there_ there. No map, no compass, no landmarks. Acting like he still gives a damn, and all the time there’s this…this blankness going on, this pure fucking _nothingness_ right behind his eyes, like a fucking snow-globe or something.” Kowalski was glaring at the wall opposite, and I swear I could almost see the grimy morgue corridor fill with white, the howling north. “You’ve been up to the Territories with him, Vecchio, it was in your file. You ever see him find a cairn up there?

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “One time, I think. Big pile of stones?”

“Right. Big fuck-off pile of stones, real exciting. Tells you where you are or where you’re going or some shit. The Mountie finds one of ’em, he lights up like the Fourth of July.”

I nodded. I’d seen it.

“So, they exile him to Chicago,” he said. “Million miles from home. And you, you’re like some kind of cairn in the urban friggin’ wilderness, okay? God knows why, but you are. Then you split for Mobsville like you got the fires of hell under your ass, and it’s whiteout time in Fraserland.” He gestured wildly, wincing as his hand smacked into the wall. “Christ, Vecchio, if someone had spelled it out to you, you might have found ten seconds out of your goddamn life to say goodbye. Or maybe you would’ve just run faster.”

Okay, that wasn’t fair. “I didn’t… It wasn’t—” I began.

“I know that, you dumbass motherfucker! That ain’t what I’m saying! Fuck’s sake, listen to me one goddamn time, would ya? Just, you were the one that fucked off. I ain’t saying you wanted to, but you did, you fucked off. And he was lonely, okay? The fucker was _lonely_. So don’t give me that whole ‘I was here first’ bullshit. You wanna be his friend, _be_ his fucking friend, and get the fuck off my fucking _case_. Christ. _Fuck._ _FUCK_.”

I stared at him and he stared back, tundra-cold, his knuckles pale on the grubby plastic seat. And we didn’t got time to end this, because Kowalski was Kowalski, and me, I had that Vegas ’tude going, and hell was gonna freeze real damn solid—like, _permafrost_ solid—before either one of us backed down.

Unless…

“You kiss my ma with that mouth?” I said.

And thank you Mary and Jesus, he blinked, the guy _blinked_ , and then he started to laugh. Laughed and laughed, till I was kinda laughing too, because that was a whole lot easier than thinking about Benny in the whiteness.

Asswipe Four-Eyes was slumped over by that point, wheezing like he had a dozen-a-day habit (which he did, when he thought no one was watching), and I was working out the odds he’d been asthmatic as a kid. In another world we might even have been buddies, comrades in the last-to-be-picked club. I took him by the shoulder and pulled him upright so he could breathe normal again, ’cause I didn’t wanna be the one who had to tell Benny that he’d snuffed it on my watch.

While Kowalski was busy figuring out how his lungs worked, I eyed the water stains on the ceiling and considered our options. No point hanging around here any longer if the COD was going to have to wait on toxicology results. Luisa Peluso’s death might have been deliberate poisoning, yeah, but it looked like the lethal one-two punch of a shiny new habit and an extra-pure batch, which meant there’d be more ODs out there, more questions to ask, more shitheads to shake down. The fact that Luisa had been the on/off girlfriend of Fletcher Scofield, son of Sonny Scofield, Head of Logistics at KOTR’s Illinois branch, was just the cherry on our overtime cake.

“C’mon, you crazy motherfucker,” I told Kowalski. “Can’t sit here all fucking day. We got some fucking _stuff_ to do.”

 

* * *

 

**KOTR-034, delivery #00168115, heading south from Jamestown, North Dakota**

Endless miles of blacktop, with never a metropolis, a landmark, a jackrabbit in sight. Three weeks into the job, handling the rig on the long flat highways no longer needed much in the way of conscious thought, and Fraser let the surface of his mind detach itself, drift back to that last long day he’d spent practicing his goods-vehicle driving on the abandoned parking lot outside of Hobart. Circuit after circuit on the vast cracked asphalt, with Ray Kowalski’s long fingers skimming fast and sure across the wheel, over and over: “Like this, see, Frase? Like this.”

He knew Ray had pulled favors at the 36th to borrow the SWAT team’s truck. The extra instruction hadn’t really been necessary after the RCMP’s intensive training course, and in any case the vehicle was a fraction of the size of the semis he’d be driving for KOTR, but he’d needed that day, that one long day before he left. An endless day, with Ray mocking his every slow, careful maneuver; Ray drumming on the dash, the tips of his hair bleached out in the sunlight, his stubble glinting gold and silver as he shook his head and sneered, his eyes full of something Fraser couldn’t name. And that night, with Ray facedown on the mattress, his T-shirt riding up, his ribs tight under birch-bark skin, his vertebrae a stark, flexing path to his narrow hips, his jeans shoved down, twisted around one ankle. Begging Fraser for more, whimpering, as if it was the first time and the last time, as if he couldn’t have enough, as if there could never be enough. As if he’d never have this again.

And it was true, in a way. One of these days, Fraser was going to die: that much was certain, the inevitability of it unassailable. One of these days he’d step cheerfully, confidently in front of a bullet, and BOOM, it wouldn’t swerve. He wouldn’t get to walk away with a flesh wound, a Band-Aid, a commendation. He wouldn’t make it back. This he already knew.

He didn’t believe it would be this time, however. It wasn’t that he could lay claim to any degree of second sight; it was simply that undercover work held little fear for one so habituated to deceit. Subterfuge had always come easily to him, more easily than even Ray could understand. If there was one thing at which Benton Fraser was expert, one thing at which he was truly adept, it was passing himself off as something he was not.

 

* * *

 

**Chicago**

Kowalski wasn’t at his apartment when I called for him that morning, and he wasn’t at his desk either. I’d gotten a tip-off about a bunch of smack-rats dealing out of a tenement building close to where Luisa Peluso had died the week before, a building I’d take a wild stab would be roach-infested, boarded up, condemned, and just our kind of stomping ground. Probably nothing to do with the Peluso girl’s death, but it was only three blocks from her family home, and without any leads to chase we were back to CPD standard operating procedure: shake the shit-tree, see what falls. And whoever fell, I was gonna need Kowalski to catch ’em.

“Oh, him?” Frannie said when I found her in the break room, going halves with Diefenbaker on the last of the crullers. “He was playing Bad Cop half the night in some interrogation or other. Huey and Dewey needed someone to put the frighteners on some perp from the Sipowicz case—”

“Sempowicz case,” I said. “Ed Sempowicz, Frannie, only the biggest drug lord in the whole city.”

“—or Sempowicz case or whatever,” she continued, unruffled. “But Kate on reception told me he crashed for a couple hours in the holding cells, so you should be good to go. Try the parking lot.”

She was right. She generally was. Kowalski flicked his cigarette butt out the GTO’s window as soon as I stepped into the lot, but he knew I’d seen him do it. He slipped the pack into his jacket, deft as a card shark.

“Don’t tell Fraser, okay?” he said quickly.

I climbed into the ugly-ass passenger seat of his ugly-ass car and gave him a once-over. His hair looked like it had been chewed up and flattened down again with wolf spittle—which maybe it had—and he was still wearing yesterday’s ratty T-shirt. And yeah, okay, a night in the cells wasn’t kind to anyone, and it wasn’t like I ever expected style from the guy, but he’d kind of given up on personal grooming in the month or so since Benny left town.

“Newsflash, Einstein,” I said, “Fraser knows you smoke. Hell, everyone and their snot-nosed cat knows you smoke. You smelled the upholstery in this rustbucket of yours recently? Fraser can track a caribou fart at ten million paces. In a blizzard.”

Kowalski all but rolled his eyes. “Sure, _Einstein_ , but there’s shit he knows and then there’s shit he _knows_ , so don’t fucking _tell_ him, okay?”

Which shouldn’t have made sense, but you know how you can blink and not notice the little things you don’t wanna notice? Or maybe you hoard up all the not-noticing so you can stare past something real big, like maybe the fact that your partner drives stick, that kind of thing? But Benny, he was on a whole other level, he was a Zen master of blanking crap out. _“Smoking is unhealthy and illogical, Ray, and therefore Ray Kowalski does not smoke.”_

And maybe I shouldn’t have bought into the crazy, but hell, sometimes it was easier just to roll with it. Even if it made me a co-conspirator. Even if it made me _Kowalski’s_ co-conspirator.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Like I’d narc on you, anyway. C’mon, Ciggy Stardust, fire up the shitmobile. I found us some bad guys to chase.”

 

* * *

 

The thing that got me—well, okay, there were a lot of things that got me, but the main thing was, he wasn’t even pretty, y’know? Not ripped, either, not like the ’roid-heads down at the gym. He was kinda…stringy, I guess. Took up a bunch of space, but only ’cause he never kept still. I would have thought Benny’d go for more of a—I dunno, but if it was gonna be a guy, then maybe a lantern-jawed Iditarod champion or something, not some scruffy loser that probably never landed a prom date in his life.

And I wasn’t even mad about it, not really, not anymore. Not when the skinny-assed Polack wasn’t right there in front of me, yanking my chain, and not so much even when he was. The stuff with Benny was kinda like when Frannie told me she’d gotten knocked up: news, but also not-news. But him picking Kowalski, that just didn’t make sense, like I’d skipped a page in the briefing pack and missed where Kowalski was worth him even noticing.

Okay, so the guy had a cute smile, which I know had to be true ’cause Frannie let it slip (“and you repeat that to anyone—especially him—you die, Ray”), with Maria nodding along all the while like she had the palsy. So I figured it was the kind of charm I got natural immunity to. Like with the Mountie: the rest of the world trembled before Benny, and I saw Sears-catalogue bland. Loved him like a brother, but he kinda reminded me of raw dough, all pale and puffy like one of Ma’s panzerotti if you took ’em out of the oil too soon.

So, yeah, I dunno. Maybe with Kowalski it was something that grew on you? Like mold or something?

 

* * *

 

**KOTR-034, delivery #00168121, 70 kilometers north of Whitehorse, Yukon Territory**

“What are you going to do about the girl, son?”

“Shhh!” Fraser glanced over his shoulder and then swiftly back to the road. “I don’t know, okay? I…I don’t know.”

Stertorous snoring was coming from where Duane O’Shaughnessy, his KOTR co-driver for this latest long-haul run, was sprawled dead-drunk in the cubbyhole behind the seats. The wretched creature Duane had dragged in at the last turnaround was stashed, sallow and listless, between the stacks of boiler components in the trailer; Fraser had seen her there when he’d raced back from the cafe, breathless, his knuckles and one ear bloodied. He’d gone into the truck stop intending no more than to pick up a coffee, but there’d been a biker by the counter who’d tried desperately to catch his eye: a gaunt, ashen man with a halo of peroxide spikes—a mocking caricature of everything Fraser was trying to forget—who’d followed him into the restroom, incautious in his hunger. A moment later, a thickset wolfish trucker had shoved at the door and seen the tableau for what it was, or for what it might have been, and Fraser had had to deck him before smashing the window out and sprinting for the rig. He’d noticed the girl crouched in the trailer, of course he’d noticed, but there’d been no time to do more than slam the tail-lift controls into life and yell at Duane to gun the engine.

Now, if Duane woke up, if he tried to touch her again, if he tried to…

Fraser wrenched his thoughts away. “Command wouldn’t want me to jeopardize the whole mission for one woman,” he hissed at his father. “Not now. Not until we’ve gotten past the middlemen. Not until we have hard evidence of the codes in the manifests.”

“She’s not a woman, Benton, she’s just a girl. How old do you suppose she is?”

“I don’t know, okay? She had tracks, needle tracks. She wanted me to… She offered…” He gestured meaninglessly. “But she barely had a word of English, and I didn’t have time to try any other language.”

Barely a word of English, and then only those words she must have learned from people like Duane, words Fraser wasn’t about to repeat to anyone, least of all his father. Words his own lips had never formed in his life, except perhaps in Ray Kowalski’s bedroom, under cover of darkness, when Ray would give him anything he could bring himself to ask for, Ray himself fluent with obscenity and blasphemy and abject need. Words that could not, ought not to be spoken; that did not, in Fraser’s daylight waking world, exist at all.

His father was humming a snatch of folksong, unfamiliar but vaguely eastern European. “She’s from Poland, I think,” he said. “I heard her singing to herself a while back. Might have a nice voice, if someone were to feed her up enough to care. You, er, happen to know anyone who speaks Polish?”

“As a matter of fact, no, I don’t.” Fraser waited, but there was only the howl of the truck as he guided it round the smashed corpse of some unidentifiable roadkill and back across the center line. “You can say his name, Dad. He has a name. And even if he did speak Polish—which he doesn’t—I’m not dragging him into this.”

His father adjusted his hat, eyes on the icebound wilderness beyond the truck.

“Bit late for that, isn’t it, son?”

 

* * *

 

**Chicago**

Four o’clock in the godforsaken a.m., and someone was pounding on the lousy front door of my lousy new house.

“Vecchio! Vecchio! Wake the hell up, will you, you lazy bastard?”

I stumbled to the window, and sure enough Kowalski’s boxy black monstrosity was abandoned slantwise to the curb, its engine still snarling. I pulled yesterday’s clothes back on, edged down the stairs, and ran for the door before Ma or Maria or Frannie could yell at me for letting him wake the kids.

He filled me in as the GTO screeched through the pre-rush-hour streets. He’d gotten a call from Sofia Ferreira, his old partner at the 36th precinct, now a lieutenant in Vice, to tell him a fifteen-year-old Polish kid had been picked up the night before in Bumfuck, Yukon, lost in the snow a half-mile from a truck stop. Some guy there—tall, fierce-eyed, dark-bearded—had waited till his co-driver had gone to take a leak, and then he’d thrust his coat at the girl, along with a burner cell with ten bucks prepaid and a single number in its memory, and bundled her out of his truck and into the dark, and told her to _run_.

“My mom’s number,” Kowalski said flatly, as if I’d known that already. “And my mom called Sofia, and Sofia had an RCMP team scrambled to find the kid and pick her up. The kid told them she’d been staying with this guy in Edmonton, figured she was his true love forever ’cause he bought her burgers and smack. They hauled him in, he talked, snitched on a dozen other lowlifes to try and save his skanky ass. A dozen, two dozen, including this one perv here in Chicago that Sofia’s team’s been working to pin the last six months. They got surveillance going on him: he runs a massage parlor downtown, lives behind the shop. And if we burn some fucking _rubber_ , we can be in on the bust.” He shot straight across an intersection, his eyes on me instead of the road. “You awake now, Vecchio? You with me?”

“Uh...” I ran a hand over my unshaven chin. Some trucker had given Kowalski’s mom’s number to some kid because—wait, rewind, _Benny_ had given Kowalski’s mom’s number to some kid because... Right. “Yeah,” I said. “Uh, the girl okay?”

“She’s underage, doesn’t speak much except Polish, ain’t giving her name. Might’ve come in via Russia and Alaska, maybe cargo ship, maybe trawler, who knows. They’re gonna stick her in a temporary foster home up in Whitehorse while they figure stuff out. Sofia’s trying to get her into a rehab program. Either way, ain’t gonna be a witness protection-type deal.”

I watched him run a stop light, then another. We both knew the kid would probably abscond or be snatched again within weeks. Haulage and logistics. Supply and demand.

“You hear Vice is getting a budget raise?” I said. “Next financial year, expanding the Child Trafficking and Exploitation unit. My transfer request went through already, guess you know that. Ferreira has your back, might be space for you there too. Y’know, if you wanted.”

He nodded, noncommittal.

“Your mom okay?” I asked.

“Dunno. It was Sofia she spoke to.”

“She hasn’t called you?”

“Nah. She wouldn’t, not since I—not in the last seven, eight months now.”

The lack of inflection made me glance across at him. Eight months: did that mean him and Benny, eight months? Huh. I wondered how long Frannie had known and not let on. I flailed for some platitude, some big bro thing maybe, because God knows I should have had enough practice at that.

“People take time, Kowalski,” I said lamely. “They just, they take time.”

“Fuck _time_. Time is what I don’t got.” He swung the GTO round a last corner, almost rear-ending the swarm of squad cars massed in front of a sleazy strip-mall. “This is it, Vecchio. Get your ass in gear. Go, go, go!”

He flung his door wide and sprinted for the building, leaving me in the dust. He might have been a scrawny streak of piss, but the guy could _move_.

 

* * *

 

Chicago wasn’t that big of a place. Might’ve looked it to an outsider, but it wasn’t. Two and a half million souls, give or take, and of those all the scum were related some way or other to all the rest. Not family, maybe, but related. Forget six degrees of separation: linking any case to any other was a cakewalk. Violent Crimes to Vice in three moves, two at a pinch. Peluso, Scofield, Sempowicz, all festering together in our great American melting pot of cross-referenced case files.

And Lieutenant Welsh was no fool. He didn’t tell us that Fraser would be fine; that his KOTR gig would probably be another couple weeks, tops; that Ottawa finally figuring he made a lousy doorman was a good thing; or that if he’d gotten any serious comeback from shoving the Polish kid out of harm’s way the week before, we’d have heard about it by now, cell phone or no cell phone. None of that. Welsh just signed off on assignments, surveillance details, overtime proformas, whatever I stuck in front of him. Whatever I needed to keep Kowalski alive and sane till Fraser got back.

Which is how come I’d been sitting in Deanna’s Old-Time Diner for the last God-knows how long, nursing a peanut butter milkshake and waiting for our relief to arrive and take over surveillance on Fletcher Scofield’s place. Half my attention was on the apartment block opposite, home sweet home to Sonny Scofield’s beloved son and heir, and the other half (okay, maybe the bigger half) was watching Kowalski down one plate of junk food after another, to the unreasonable admiration of our cutie-pie waitress.

“How long now?” he asked me, finishing his cheeseburger and winking at Candice, who sashayed away to fetch him the next.

“Another hour to go.” I leaned over and stole the last of his fries, just to even the score: no one should get the girl _and_ the ketchup. Especially not him. “Another hour to go, and Fletcher probably ain’t even home anyways. He’ll be out with a new girlfriend by now. It’s been three whole weeks since the last one kicked the bucket.”

“Cynic,” he said appreciatively. “Any dirt we can get on him is leverage on his dad, though. Gotta be worth a shot.”

“Yeah, well, five bucks gets you ten he had nothing to do with Luisa Peluso’s death and knows sweet FA about his daddy’s little white-powder sideline.”

“Not gonna take that bet.” He waved the dessert menu at me. “Bright side, though, Vecchio, we got time for pie. Hey, anyone out there worth looking at yet?”

I nodded toward a leggy blonde heading fast downtown. “How ’bout her? She’s an eight.”

Kowalski peered over his shoulder and snorted. “No friggin’ way! Six out of ten, max.”

“Eight.”

“Seven?”

“Eight,” I said. “Blonde. Tight pants. Eight.”

“Bullshit! And besides, Frannie’ll have your ass for objectioni—objectic—”

“Not if you don’t tell her, she won’t,” I said. “And it’s ‘objectification’, numbnuts.”

“That too,” he agreed. “She put a rocket up me the other day when I called a chick a ‘chick’. Gotta say ‘woman’.”

“Fine, that _woman_ is an eight. And just so you know, Kowalski, if you put a score on my sister, I’d have to kill you, and then I’d have to do time, and doing time would suck, so don’t make that happen.”

“Nah, ’s okay. Perfect ten for her.”

“Really?” I said, caught between skepticism and a kind of pride.

“Yeah. Family rates.” He grinned that dorky underbite grin at me, his teeth glinting reptilian in the sunshine. “Oh, hey, check it out. Guy in the green shirt. Seven-point-five?”

“Nope, six,” I said automatically. Then the words sank in, and it took all my self-control to keep looking out the window like he hadn’t just said what he’d just said.

Obviously I’d known, but I hadn’t _known_. Ten out of ten for balls, Kowalski.

 

* * *

 

Another week gone, and still no word from Benny. The heap of paperwork on my desk had grown a few inches higher, and a crumpled copy of _Boise CarMart_ had been left open across the detritus, with one advertisement circled: a battered Buick Riviera in patchy Fire Red. A note in the margin in Kowalski’s kindergarten scrawl read “Wrong color, right spec?”

He was at his own desk, head down in a case file, so I went over and waved the newspaper under his nose so he could quit pretending he wasn’t watching me. He frowned like I’d interrupted serious research.

“Oh, that,” he said. “Long ways off. Needs a shitload of work, too. I thought we could maybe get it as a weekend project kind of thing. Maybe.”

Huh. Weekend project? Which had to mean he was planning to stick around, that he and Benny were planning to stick around. Which was the last of those things I hadn’t ever asked about.

“We could do a re-spray,” he added quickly. “If it’s gotta be Snot Green, I mean.” He blinked up at me with that wary, feral, fight-or-flight look he got when he wanted something bad enough. (The last of my peanut butter milkshake. A beat-up old car that wasn’t worth half its asking price. Benny, always. And this, whatever this was. This…not-hating.)

“Could do,” I said. And what the heck, only the entire squad room was watching, so I reached over and ruffled his hair, just to piss him off. “Could do. And yeah, Kowalski, it’s gotta be Snot Green.”

* * *

 

Twelve hours crouched in a closet the size of a phone booth: with any other guy it might’ve been weird. In the light bleeding under the door, I could just make out the clutter of brooms and buckets taking up most of the space. Kowalski was coiled up next to me, motionless for once in his life, and not just because he had to be; the worst of his antsiness had vanished the minute we’d gotten the call from Thatcher at the Consulate, although where his leg was pressed against mine I could still feel its fine tremor.

We’d been hidden in the office block’s third-floor janitor closet since seven that morning, listening to people arriving and slogging through their shift and heading home again. By now the building had fallen silent, the only sound the tiny click of Kowalski’s jaw as he chewed his gum. It would have bugged the hell out of me, except I knew it was nicotine and he was trying to quit. It’d been three weeks since I last smelled smoke on him.

We were in borrowed overalls just in case, Welsh having figured the executive officers of KOTR Haulage & Logistics’ local headquarters would be the type to notice their janitors’ uniform, not their faces, but I waited half an hour after the last of the admin staff were gone before I unlocked the closet door and peered out. All was quiet, all clear.

We staggered on shaky legs down the corridor, through two pairs of fire-doors and right to the end, to the corner office marked _S.P. Scofield,_ _Head of Logistics_. I unpacked our box of electronic doodads, cursing as their skeins of little wires tangled round my fingers, and Kowalski caught them up neatly and slid them into place. A quick check of our earpieces, and we were set. Word on the street had it Scofield had called an after-hours meeting with Vince McElwaine, right-hand man to Ed Sempowicz, everyone’s favorite neighborhood drug baron, and we’d scored front row seats. It still kind of sucked that we were gonna miss the main bust over at O’Hare, especially when it was the RCMP’s Serious  & Organized Crime unit—Benny’s group—who had passed our guys all the intel on KOTR’s air freight connections, but if we could get enough dirt on Scofield, the DA reckoned she could get him to turn state’s evidence and pin half of Sempowicz’s crew. All of which might just make the broom closet, the muscle cramps, the whole damn twelve hours worthwhile.

With the bugs safely hidden, I hurried to the men’s room, leaving Kowalski heading toward the lunchroom and waving his cell phone around in search of a signal.

“Got it,” he said when I rejoined him. “Scofield’s detail say he’s already en route, ETA fifteen minutes. McElwaine’s is thirty. Plan is green for go.” He jabbed at the cell. “Aw, shit.”

“What?” I stopped trying to rub the feeling back into my calf muscles and looked up.

“It’s Fraser. No, jeez, Vecchio, take a pill! He’s fine, he’s fine! It’s just, he so nearly got back in time. He’s gonna be pissed as hell he missed all this.”

“He’s okay? Where’s he at?”

“Thatcher forwarded the message, says they just let him out of debriefing at the Consulate.” Kowalski snapped the phone shut. “They probably had him recite all his intel in triplicate, the fuckers. Half an hour earlier and he would have made it here.”

“Nah, no time,” I said. “McElwaine’s people might have the entrance scoped out. Can’t risk anyone coming in or out now.”

He shrugged acknowledgement.

“Might be for the best, anyway,” I said. “Fraser’s gotta be bone-tired. Besides, we got this all planned out already, and we don’t need him improvising. You know he’s gonna get us both killed one of these days or die trying.”

I bit down on the words too late, feeling like a jerk, but Kowalski just nodded like it was some weird yearbook honor or something, _The Guy with the Misplaced Enthusiasm Most Likely to get his Colleagues Fatally Injured_ , which maybe in Canada it would be.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I know. Kinda worth it, though. It’s like…I dunno. You read the comics as a kid, right, Vecchio? Superman, Spider-Man—”

“Nah, not Spider-Man. DC all the way.”

“Whatever, you read ’em. So when you’re a kid you wanna be Superman. You hit your teens, you wanna _have_ Superman.”

“Lost me there, buddy,” I said.

“But Supe’s a perfect ten, you get that, right? And Fraser, he’s like… I mean, he’s, it’s, we’re…” His words were beginning to tumble over each other, and even in the darkened room his flush was obvious. “We _were_. Fuck it, we _were_ , but I don’t even know if—”

“Holy Mother, shut up, will you, Kowalski?” I flung out a hand to cut him off and took a deep breath and then another, because I hadn’t signed up for this, I hadn’t signed up for any of this, and some days there was a part of me, maybe just a small part, saying hey, can I go back to Vegas yet? Because Vegas was _easy_.

One more breath. And then, like the guy said, fuck it. If there was one thing I’d learned from all those years with Benny, it was that sometimes you just gotta close your eyes and _jump_.

“Look, you stupid shit-for-brains,” I said, “Fraser was nuts about you two months ago, so he’ll still be nuts about you now, ’cause that’s just how it works with him. I can’t believe I even gotta tell you that. And in case you ain’t noticed, Chicago ain’t DC Universe and it ain’t Marvel either, so if the crazy bastard thinks he’s some kind of hero, he needs someone around to stop him getting whacked. So knock yourself out. Buy a freaking cape. And, Kowalski…?”

“Yeah?”

“Shut the hell up, okay? _Okay?_ ”

His grin was split-second but blinding. He opened his mouth—because no one ever did shut up when I told them to, least of all him—but then we heard the screech of a car pulling up in the street outside, and we had to scramble to close the lunchroom door and re-check our earpieces and hunker down for the big show.

All the pieces were falling into place. If this was Scofield arriving, McElwaine wouldn’t be far behind, and we were gonna have the pair of them right where we wanted.

 

* * *

 

No one was answering Ray Vecchio’s home or office phone lines; nor, when Fraser tried them after a moment’s ignoble hesitation, was there any response from Ray Kowalski’s various numbers. The relief of it flooded him with a warm familiar shame. In a lifetime of acts commonly misinterpreted as heroic—hurling himself in and out of speeding cars, plucking children from burning buildings, leaping from cliffs and tower blocks alike—he had never managed to grasp that plain quotidian courage other people seemed to possess as if by birthright. He could walk out of his life for the sake of a RCMP assignment, however risky, without the least hesitation. Looking Ray Kowalski in the eye when he got back, not knowing what he might see there: that was the part he had yet to master.

Nonetheless, deliberate delay was something he could not permit himself. Declining Turnbull’s offer of a home-cooked supper at the Consulate, he hiked over to the 27th precinct, where Francesca Vecchio—now eight months pregnant and astonishingly huge—was delighted to see him and even more delighted by his gallant compliments on her figure. She flung down her _Perfect Baby_ magazine and engulfed him in a bear hug, apologizing repeatedly, between exclamations, for how quiet the station was, how few people were around to greet his return. It was because of a major operation, she told him, a big showdown happening that night over at the North Freight Terminal at O’Hare.

“Everyone wants a piece of it,” she said, trying to smooth his plaid shirt where she’d rumpled it. “CPD, DEA, the works. There’s a drug shipment coming in and they’re gonna catch Ed Sempowicz with his pants down. But you probably know all about that already, huh, Frase?”

He shrugged, side-stepping until he was just out of her reach. Eight weeks on the road as an undercover operative, fifteen hours since he’d been pulled out by the Serious & Organized Crime unit’s extraction team, three-point-two kilograms of heroin concealed in the used butane canisters on his rig, and one pen-drive loaded with all of KOTR’s truck manifests and air freight connections for the last decade: yes, it was fair to say that he knew about it.

“Right.” Francesca regarded him, her head cocked. “No comment. I get it. So, you looking for Ray Kowalski and my brother? They didn’t get to go to the ball, they got sent on some lame-ass wiretap detail instead. They were kinda pissy about it, but someone had to do it. They’ll be back in a bit, if you wanna wait for them here.”

She winked at him then, to his blushing confusion, and she’d fished out her crumpled, much-annotated list of baby names and resumed her old game of trying to outwit his polite evasions, when Dewey came storming out of the squad room, grabbed Fraser by the elbow, and started hustling him along the corridor leading to the parking lot.

“Hey!” Francesca called after them. “Hey, you can’t just—”

“Vince McElwaine’s son’s been killed in a shootout with Fletcher Scofield,” Dewey said, ignoring her and hauling Fraser along faster. “That kid I got Kowalski to put the screws on last month, he gave me the heads-up. Guess it was the Good Cop act turned his crank after all. He told me Fletcher blamed the McElwaine boy for getting Luisa Peluso hooked on smack.”

The jumble of names meant little to Fraser, but he tried dutifully to memorize them even as he stumbled to keep up, skinning his shin on one of the benches lining the corridor.

“Watch the seats, fuckwit!” Dewey kicked the back door open and yanked Fraser through it so hard he almost fell. “You deaf or what? If McElwaine’s heard about his kid, the meet with Sonny Scofield’ll be a bloodbath, and I can’t get a fucking response from Kowalski’s cell. For Christ’s sake, move, Fraser, move!”

 

* * *

 

The engine noise had cut out, but Scofield was taking his sweet time letting himself into the building. Kowalski kept glancing at me as if he was about to say something and then glancing away, and I got real tired of that real quick.

“What?” I hissed.

“Nothing,” he whispered. “Just, y’know, thanks, I guess.”

“The hell for?”

He hunched farther down, his shoulders bent inwards, his fingers picking at the empty sleeves of his overalls where he’d tied them around his waist.

“It’s not a damn benediction, Kowalski,” I said. “You hurt Fraser, you do one single thing to hurt him, and I’ll—”

“—ream me six ways from Sunday. Yeah, yeah. Right back at you, asshole.”

I caught that lightning smile of his again, and suddenly I was hoping like hell that I’d been right about Benny, that the two of them were gonna be some kind of okay – and I knew it wasn’t just Benny I was worrying about anymore.

The elevator pinged, finally, _finally_ , and we both ducked down into the shadows. I watched through the venetian slats covering the glass panel of our door as Sonny Scofield, a dark-jowled prizefighter of a guy, lumbered past our hideaway and down the corridor toward his office at the far end of the block. A few clicks and thumps on the wire, and then his radio started up, shitty chart-topping country and western, loud enough that we could have held a barn dance and he wouldn’t have heard us. I pulled my earpiece loose. No need to put up with that crap till McElwaine turned up.

Minutes passed, the lunchroom clock ticking, the leaky tap dripping in crazed syncopation.

Kowalski was still listening in on the wire, his fingers twitching. No surprise there: anything that had a beat, that did it for him. I’d caught him two or three times watching Disney musicals with Gabriella and singing along in gleeful disharmony. If I scoffed, he’d just wink and tell me taste was for posers—him, he’d take anything—and there wasn’t much I could say to that in front of the kids.

We waited, minute after minute grinding by. McElwaine must be running late. At one point Kowalski pushed his earpiece aside and fished out his cell, but its screen was blank and unresponsive. He held it up to me, shrugging. Dead battery. It didn’t matter. There were plenty of office phones we could use to call for backup once we’d gotten the wiretaps taped, the drugs seized, McElwaine cuffed. All we needed now was for the guy to show up.

 

* * *

 

The brickwork was abrasive, tearing at Fraser’s fingers as he climbed. At some level of his consciousness well below that of the pain, numbers were spinning: nine meters from the concrete footings to the third-floor windows, assuming bricks of standard imperial size, would mean…

He paused a moment, still calculating abstractly, while he waited for a gust of wind strong enough to let him jump across to the streetlamp bracket. Forty kilometers per hour, not enough. Fifty, almost. Sixty: he jumped, caught at the metalwork, and dangled there until his feet found purchase. Then he dug his fingertips into the mortar and began climbing again, counting the courses as he ascended. Standard height plus ten millimeters—no, wait, three-eighths of an inch—per joint would mean…

His calculation spat out its result just as his count reached the same number, and he halted at the 135th brick, breathing hard. The alleyway below was still empty, still clear. He’d left Dewey half a block away, out of sight of the building’s front entrance, relaying info rapid-fire into his car radio and cell phone. It was a busy shift, with no units clear for backup, all available crews either dealing with urgent responses or already out at O’Hare, but if Dewey heard gunshots he could be trusted to take out McElwaine’s driver along with anyone else still at ground level.

Three stories up, Fraser inched across till he could peer round to the building’s concrete-clad north face, where the window to the lunchroom—the one marked in red on the floor plan Dewey had snatched up from Ray Vecchio’s desk—ought to have been located. There it was, a metal-framed window, an easy leap away, even with the setting sun directly in Fraser’s eyes. It was shut, but its sill looked wide enough to balance on, if he could just manage to grasp the top hinge.

He leapt, grabbed, found his balance. A heartbeat passed and then another, as two shadows darted across the blinds. Then the window slid open and he was hauled in.

They were dressed in janitors’ clothes, Ray Vecchio cool and steady as ever, Ray Kowalski watching Fraser intently, the animated physicality of him startling after so many weeks of flat, looping memories. His boiler suit was peeled to the waist, its arms knotted round his hips, revealing—underneath his Kevlar vest—the Cubs T-shirt Fraser secretly loved, the one with its sleeves torn off and its cotton worn gossamer-soft by a thousand spin-cycles. The smell of him, all clean sweat and gel, washed over Fraser like homesickness, making him newly conscious of his own filthy army-surplus pants, his eight-week beard, the long lank hair itching under his cap.

“Perfect ten?” he heard Ray Vecchio mutter to Ray Kowalski.

“Yup.”

It made no sense, so Fraser ignored it. No time to ask. “You’re here for a meeting with Sonny Scofield and a dealer named McElwaine?” he said.

Ray Vecchio didn’t blink. “Yeah, we got a wire going. Gonna try and get Scofield to turn state’s evidence. Just waiting for McElwaine to show up with the H and make the deal.”

“No deal,” Fraser said. “The game’s changed. Scofield’s son has killed McElwaine’s, and there’s a car full of armed men heading for the front entrance. We take them out or you lose your witness. Clear?”

 

* * *

 

For a moment—a long damn moment—I just stared, waiting for my brain to catch up. A car full of armed men: right, okay, got it. A shitload of trouble we hadn’t seen coming, but we still had the ambush, we still had the edge. Plus now we had Benny, and even if he did get us all killed, it’d be _fun_. Stupid and painful, yeah; lethal, possibly; but fun. And maybe I should have been surprised to see him scrambling in at that window, but I hadn’t been, not real surprised. Stairs were for pussies. Show the Mountie a tower block and he was all, “Look, Ray, a climbing frame! Race you to the top!”

Behind me I could sense Kowalski shifting from foot to foot, but Benny was shifting too, like a counterweight, keeping me piggy-in-the-middle. Whatever was going on with him and Kowalski, it was obvious he wasn’t gonna deal with it right then, and—like I said before—he was a past master at not dealing.

Kowalski, though—Kowalski hadn’t gotten the memo. Kowalski never got memos, and he never did what people expected, not if he could help it. He stepped, deliberate and unavoidable, right into Benny’s eye line.

“Idiot,” he spat, the word fierce and hard-edged, and for a moment I forgot to breathe, because I had no real clue how things were between them, no real clue how things had ever been between them.

Then I saw him reach out, and before I could think to look away he’d pulled Benny close and kissed him, hard and swift, and Benny was leaning into him too, pressing his forehead to Kowalski’s, breathing in his chewing-gum breath and grasping at his shoulders with fingers all bruised and bloodied from the climbing.

And then I did look away, because I figured I had a gun I needed to check or load or something, and I’d slid the clip in and out twice already before Benny stepped back. I could tell he was fumbling for the right words, those real easy words he never could get right, so I jumped in before he could start with the throat-clearing.

“It’s okay, Benny.” I nodded toward Kowalski, who’d straightened his glasses and was checking his own gun, all poise and purpose, mission statement personified, except that his whole body was kind of humming, kind of vibrating, like he was high on happiness, like Benny was something better than nicotine, even. “See?” I told Benny. “We’re good. All of us.”

He stiffened, and for a moment I wondered what I’d said wrong, but then I saw he was reaching for his knife like he’d heard something we hadn’t.

“Elevator’s on the move,” he hissed. “You ready?”

I glanced at Kowalski. No discussion, no hesitation: we ran to the door and pressed ourselves behind its jambs, Kowalski on the right, me on the left, our guns leveled.

“Second floor,” Benny whispered. “Third floor.”

The elevator mechanism hummed and whooshed and finally pinged as its cab drew level. This was it, no time left. Do or die.

Benny put one hand on the lunchroom door and held the other up, three fingers raised.

Three.

Two.

One.

 

**BOOM.**

* * *

**POSTSCRIPT (life goes on)**

* * *

 

“Wait, what?” Frannie yells. “What the...? You can’t just leave it there!”

“Yeah, come on, Raymondo!” Ma says. “You have to tell us what happened!”

“You know what happened, Ma,” I say, pointing to Kowalski’s arm, still swathed in its bandages. “I told you already. You wanna hear it again? You all wanna hear it again? Okay, listen up, kids. See that idiot there? He runs straight into a bullet, _bam!_ into his Kevlar vest—”

“Bam! Bam!” Gabriella shrieks, till Frannie shushes her and tells me to go on, like she hasn’t heard the story twenty times already.

“—and then another bullet, _bam!_ into his arm,” I say. “Messy, real messy. You know when Auntie Frannie’s trying to eat spaghetti and she gets the sauce all over Ma’s tablecloth?” I wait till the kids are giggling and nudging Frannie. “Yeah, that messy. And you know _why_ he runs into a bullet? Just so he can’t hold a pen. Next three months, I gotta do all his paperwork as well as my own.”

Kowalski grins at me. The crazy bastard, he’d been more pissed about his ruined tattoo than anything. “Yeah, so then Fraser, he runs over,” he begins, but I interrupt, ’cause he ain’t gonna tell it right.

“So then Benny dives right in front of Kowalski,” I say, “’cause you know he’s never had a lick of sense where Kowalski’s concerned—”

Frannie snorts, and Ma snorts right along. One-two snorts, they’re like a Vecchio family specialty.

“And Benny gets hit in the neck, _bam!_ ” I say. “And the blood goes _everywhere!_ ”

The kids do big round eyes at this, and the littlest one starts to pout. Kowalski gives me a warning look and wraps it up real quick: “But he was fine, and I was fine, and Detective Dewey came storming up the stairs to the rescue, and he and your Uncle Ray rounded up all the bad guys and put them in jail, and we all got to go home in time for Christmas, so yay!”

“Yay!” Gabriella says. “Um, but where’s Uncle Benny?”

“He’s, uh, he’s having his bandages re-tied,” Kowalski says. “And your Uncle Ray and I are just gonna go check on him. Right, Vecchio?”

“Right,” I say. “Er…we are? Right. We are.”

On the way to the hospital I glance surreptitiously at Kowalski once or twice, trying to check out his expression, figure out why he’s dragging me back again today. ’Cause, okay, don’t get me wrong, I love Benny plenty, and I was almost as crazy-worried as Kowalski when we pulled him out of KOTR’s offices covered in blood, but he’s fine now, and we’ve been to see him almost every day since, so what’s the emergency?

And usually Kowalski is a lousy actor—like you can’t believe he does undercover and still ain’t dead yet—but maybe he’s been taking lessons from Benny, ’cause he’s sitting here in the GTO’s passenger seat like he’s the deadpan champion of the world, and I can’t even tell if he’s still pissed I get to drive his car.

“MaxFax ward,” he says when we get to the hospital, like I don’t know already.

(I didn’t know, the first time. I thought maybe MaxFax meant maximum injuries or something. Hey, I was scared to death, I was just scared, okay? The surgeon had to come explain it to me: maxillofacial reconstruction, ’cause Benny’d gotten hit in the angle of his neck and jaw. It turned out the doc was worried Benny was going to end up scarred and it’d end his career, and I had to explain that, no, he wasn’t a model, he was a _Mountie_. And no, I didn’t think he’d mind a bit of scarring. He might even like it, it might stop women throwing themselves at him all the time. Which made the surgeon laugh at me and tell me I clearly didn’t know much about women.)

“MaxFax ward,” I confirm. “I’ll go grab a soda or something. See you in ten.”

Kowalski winks at me as if _he’s_ the one doing _me_ a favor, and he goes off up the corridor to see Benny and hold his hand or whatever, while I stand around and stare at the Infection Prevention posters with their pictures of oozing wounds and top ten bacterial suspects. “ _Clos-trid-i-um diff_ …” I mutter to myself. “ _Diff-i_ …”

“Hey,” the maxillofacial surgeon says, behind me. “It’s you again.”

“Yeah, me again,” I say, like the idiot I am. And then I suddenly figure out that, no, I don’t know much about women, but I’d really like to. “Hey,” I say, turning. “You, er, do you maybe want to have dinner with me sometime?”

“Yeah,” she says slowly, considering me as if I might be something better than a bacterium after all. “Yeah, okay. I’d think I’d like that.”

 

 

(And somehow I just know Ma’s gonna love this ending.)

 

 


End file.
